After Bernie Sanders’s commanding win in Nevada on February 22, establishment Democrats rushed to cast him as a divisive figure, a left-wing ideologue.

“Senator Sanders believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans,” Pete Buttigieg, a leading rival at the time, said in a speech that night. “We cannot out-divide the divider in chief,” insisted Amy Klobuchar — implying that Bernie’s approach was the same as Trump’s. This absurd logic equated Bernie’s attacks on a small but powerful set of corporate interests with Trump’s attacks on large segments of society — including immigrants and people of color, whose interests Bernie was doing his damnedest to represent.

Now that Bernie has lost, the establishment has concluded that his left-wing base was simply outnumbered. Will Marshall of the liberal Progressive Policy Institute wrote that Bernie’s base was “far too narrow and too sectarian,” while Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress told Politico that leftists were wrong in thinking that “their views represented a strong majority.” The “Ideas” section of the Atlantic proclaimed Bernie “wrong about America.”